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Comment by refenestrator | Hacker News Reader

If I recall, the context was that he was dating a woman who was a bit of a tomboy and saying how cool it was that she was better at power tools and such than he was, and this comparison to typical SF tech women was part of that extended riff. It wasn't part of an incel monologue about 'femoids' or something.

Ultimately, if we let this continue, it becomes a war on flavor and humor, where no rhetorical fun is allowed lest someone take it the wrong way.

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your point is fair. i agree with the idea that allowing outrage to drive all conversations is terrible.

at the same time, i feel like i’d have known better than to generalize like this and publish it. i understand there’s context about how/why it was said.

i’d really love to be able to express my thoughts that border on “anti-woke” but i don’t. i feel like the only way for us to be honest about our feelings is to be anonymous.

i guess at some level i would hope this person would’ve been smart enough to know that. there’s a social game we all have to play, and just because it sucks we can’t not deal with it.

In a modern social media world, it's generally a pretty bad idea to make over the top controversial statements even if they have a context and you don't intend them to be taken seriously. And it's probably worth noting that in this case, it became an issue because the person in question wrote them in a published book and was being hired for a fairly high-profile position. But it can just as easily be some 20-something who posts something on Twitter (or gets captured for YouTube)that goes viral, given they're essentially disposable from the perspective of their current (and potential future) employers.

And I don't even blame the companies. They're just looking out for their own interests and individual current or potential future employees have pretty much zero weight as balanced against any public PR hit.

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